This period has been a slow burning project for me over the last few years (actually 7 years when I checked)! and has evolved over time. My original plan consisted of coercing a mate into this with me and I built a Prussian army while he built a French army, using Baccus figures and the 1870 rules. It dragged on and we have been gaming less together in the last 5 years, so he ended up getting out of it, and I brought his French army. It was mostly painted and pretty well painted, but my OCD means I will end up repainting the figures to match the style of the rest of the additional figure I will paint for it. And during the last few years my interest in playing the 1870 rules waned, so I looked at the Black Powder rules instead.

Fast forward to 2022 and I had a game of “They Died for Glory” with a mate in 15mm. I’d never heard of these rules before but it was very enjoyable and renewed my interest in the period in a big way. I brought a copy of the rules and decided to downsize the games to suit 6mm figures, by reducing measurements from inches to centimeters. I worked out the following sizes based roughly on the TDFG base sizes as well as what I could practically fit on a base. The Baccus formed foot figures have about a 5mm frontage per figure which fitted in nicely with the reduced base sizes.

Unit/Size per base	15mm base size	6mm base size	figures per base
Prussian Infantry	1 7/8″ or 47.5mm	25mm	2 ranks of 5 each
French Infantry	1 1/2″ or 38mm	20mm	2 ranks of 4 each
French Chasseurs	1 1/8″ or 28.5mm	15mm	3 skirmishers
Cavalry	1 1/2″ or 38mm	20mm	1 rank of 3
Artillery/Mitrailleuse	1 1/2″ or 38mm	20mm	1 gun and 4 crew

I’m ignoring the base depth as a 15mm infantry base is meant to be 1/2″ (12.5mm) deep in the rules, which is thin for 15mm, and probably about 5mm deep for 6mm figures. Not only is it impractical it will be a pain with bases falling over all the time. Instead I have gone for 15mm deep for everything except artillery, which will be 20mm deep. This means I can have 2 ranks of infantry which will look very good. For the cavalry and artillery, there isn’t enough room to to fit the figures on the base if I go any shallower.

A website that I find very inspirational Horse and musket style games is Grymauch’s Blog and the look of his figures and units is fantastic. His bases and the number of figures per base is actually quite small however the effect is spectacular. He has written a number of very good posts on basing and one was a very interesting article on basing here, which resonated with me.

After rummaging through my stockpile of plasticard to trial different thickness, I settled on 0.5mm plasticard, which is glued onto 0.8mm steel paper, giving a total base thickness of 1.3mm. I prefer thin and I’d rather deal with any issues of handling the figure vs thick plinth like bases.

I was a little worried that such small bases will be very fiddly to move around the table, so I have used steel paper on the bases and I will cut up some magnetic sheets to mount the units on with a few different shapes for different formation types. This will make storage easier too.

I’ve started rebasing some of my exiting units but there is a lot to do. I plan to have about 25-30 infantry and 8-9 cavalry units per side, so that’s about 130-160 bases per army! and then there is the Artillery, Generals and Skirmishers…

Next post I hope to show some of my recently finished FPW cavalry, so stay tuned.